Chapter Four
Open Prairie
The rider's arrival interrupted a disagreement over Nathaniel's breakfast. Eleanor believed a man with a healing shoulder required porridge. Nathaniel believed marriage had not transferred ownership of his appetite.
“I can eat bacon,” he said.
“You can also lift a wagon tongue,” Eleanor replied. “Neither is happening this morning.”
Thomas dismounted beside them. “Should I report a domestic emergency?”
“Report that marriage is tyranny,” Nathaniel said.
Eleanor handed him the porridge. “Report that the tyrant added honey.”
Nathaniel ate.
The breakfast argument ended when an eastbound rider arrived before the fires were cold.
He carried mail, news, and the dust of several hundred miles. Nathaniel traded information with him near the lead wagon while the company prepared to move. Thomas recognized the man as Caleb Marsh, a chainman he had worked with two years earlier.
Caleb recognized him at the same moment.
“Reed!” He swung down and struck Thomas's shoulder in greeting. “I heard you were somewhere on the trail.”
“That narrows the country.”
Caleb laughed. “Still measuring your jokes before you speak them.”
Thomas saw Caroline at the Whitaker wagon. She was fastening Father's pouch beneath the bench. She did not appear to listen.
She listened to everything.
Caleb lowered his voice only slightly. “Major Whitcomb needs a man near Fort Kearny. Mapping wagon roads, water, ground fit for camps. Paid through summer, perhaps longer. I told him you were the best available.”
“You told him I was available?”
“You always are.”
The words were meant kindly.
Thomas looked west. Fort Kearny meant steady pay, organized work, and a room that did not move every morning. It meant measuring a defined district instead of following a family toward an Oregon settlement he had never seen.
Three months ago, he would have accepted before Caleb finished the sentence.
“I am traveling with this company,” Thomas said.
“The post is on their road. Decide when you reach it.” Caleb handed him a folded paper. “Whitcomb will hold the place if you arrive promptly.”
Thomas put the letter inside his coat.
When he looked toward the Whitaker wagon again, Caroline was helping Lucy tighten a bootlace.
She did not look at him.
*****
CAROLINE TOLD HERSELF the mapping position was good news.
Thomas was a surveyor. Surveyors required surveys. Fort Kearny required men who understood roads, rivers, measurements, and the irritating habit of turning ordinary objects into moral observations.
The position suited him.
She tightened the lead ox's strap until Rebecca reached over and loosened it by one hole.
“Too tight,” Rebecca said.
“I knew that.”
“You were proving it?”
“Go to your wagon.”
Rebecca followed her gaze toward Thomas. “Ah.”
“There is no ah.”
“There is a very large one.”
Caroline climbed onto the bench. “We are moving.”
The morning road crossed rolling ground broken by shallow swales. The first two were dry. The third looked dry until Mr. Turner's front wheel sank nearly to the hub.
Mrs. Bell leaned from her wagon and studied the buried wheel. “That ground appeared perfectly honest.”
“So did Mr. Bell when he asked me to marry him,” she said. “Both impressions proved optimistic.”
Nathaniel halted the company. Men gathered with ropes and shovels. Mr. Turner urged his team forward, but the wheel only settled deeper.
“Stop,” Caroline called. “You will bury the axle.”
Mr. Turner let the reins fall. “I cannot leave it there.”
“No one suggested you should.”
Thomas walked around the trapped wagon, testing the ground with his measuring rod. Caroline climbed down and joined him.
“The edge is firmer,” he said. “If we pull straight back, the other wheel will enter the soft ground.”
“Then we unload the right side and turn the rear slightly north.”
“The angle is narrow.”
“Can you mark it?”
Thomas looked at her. Whatever lay between them—the letter, the unasked question, Rebecca's enormous ah—fell behind the work.
“Yes.”
Freeing the sunken wheel required more than the neat plan suggested afterward.
Caroline ordered the back half of the wagon unloaded while Thomas drove stakes along the firmest angle.
Flour sacks, bedding, a cradle, and three iron pans spread across the grass.
Mrs. Bell guarded her best china as if the marsh had developed criminal intent.
When the team pulled, the wheel rose two inches and slid sideways.
Thomas called for a halt. Caroline saw the downhill ox losing footing and shifted six people to the rear rope before the wagon could tip.
On the second pull, mud released the wheel with a sound like a giant boot being yanked from clay.
Nathaniel credited both of them before the company.
Thomas immediately named Caroline's load order as the reason the wagon remained balanced.
Caroline named his escape angle. Mr. Avery said they might continue praising one another until supper if no one stopped them.
The laughter eased the danger, but Caroline carried Thomas's unspoken decision about Fort Kearny into the night.
During the reloading, Mrs. Bell discovered that one of her china cups had been placed in a crate with horseshoe nails. She held the intact cup aloft and demanded to know who had attempted murder.
Mr. Bell said the cup appeared healthy. Mrs. Bell said survival did not excuse the crime.
Caroline traced the crate to Mr. Avery, who had helped unload during the marsh recovery. Avery claimed he had been saving the cup from mud. Charlotte asked why safety required nails. Avery said the question was hostile.
Thomas examined the cup. “No fracture.”
“There may be invisible injury,” Mrs. Bell said.
“I am not qualified to assess emotional damage in crockery.”
“Then your education is incomplete.”
Caroline found clean cloth and showed Mrs. Bell how to wrap each cup separately before replacing the crate. Thomas cut thin wooden dividers from a broken produce box. Mr. Bell watched them work and whispered that the cups had traveled farther with more comfort than he had.
Mrs. Bell heard. She always heard. “The work sounds respectable,” she said.
He did not pretend to misunderstand. “It is.”
“Steady.”
“Likely.”
“You have not had steady work?”
“I have had continuous work. It has not always occupied the same place.”
“Do you want the same place?”
Thomas looked ahead. “I have never required it.”
That was not an answer. Caroline recognized the method because she used it herself.
“Fort Kearny is not Clover Creek,” she said.
“No.”
“You never said you intended to come to Clover Creek.”
“No.”
Each quiet answer placed another measured foot between them.
Caroline clicked to the oxen. “We should regain the lost time.”
Thomas fell back.
*****
BEFORE SUPPER, THE china had become another company story: the surveyor who mapped a teacup, the capable lady who organized saucers, and the husband who nearly slept beneath a different wagon.
The foolishness gave everyone a way to laugh after the dangerous swale without pretending the danger had been small.
Before darkness settled, Caroline made one final circuit of the freed wagon. Mud coated the wheel hub, the rope had frayed near the anchor knot, and two flour sacks still waited in the grass. She assigned Lydia and Grace to carry the lighter goods while Rebecca inspected the axle.
Thomas crouched beside the wheel with his level across his knees. “The hub is sound.”
“You have said that twice.”
“You have checked it three times.”
Caroline wiped mud from the rim. “If it fails tomorrow, Mr. Avery will tell everyone the marsh predicted it.”
“Mr. Avery believes weather, wheels, and coffee all respond to his opinions.”
They reloaded the wagon together. Thomas asked where each item belonged before lifting it, a courtesy Caroline had not known she wanted until someone offered it.
When the last sack was secured, he showed her the angle they had used to escape the swale and asked what she would change next time.
Caroline shifted the proposed rope team uphill and reduced the unloading order by one layer.
Thomas amended his notebook without defending his first plan.
Mr. Daugherty passed and remarked that a great deal of ink had been spent on one muddy wheel. Caroline answered that ink was cheaper than an axle. Thomas wrote that down too.
At supper, the eastbound rider's news moved from fire to fire.
Men discussed wages at Fort Kearny as if Thomas had already accepted them.
Caroline heard him answer every question except the one she wanted asked.
He described the work, the equipment, and the summer schedule.
He never said whether he wished to stay.
By the time Charlotte joined her beneath the wagon, Caroline had invented six practical reasons to care and believed none of them.
That night Charlotte sat beside Caroline beneath the wagon, combing tangles from Grace's hair while Caroline checked Father's papers.
The brass compass lay open on her blanket.
“Thomas may leave at Fort Kearny,” Caroline said.
Charlotte drew the comb through a knot. Grace winced.
“He may.”
“Nathaniel will need another scout familiar with maps.”
“Nathaniel had a company before Thomas joined it.”
“Father's route is wrong in places.”
“You are learning to correct it.”
Caroline frowned at the compass. “I have taken three bearings.”
“All correct.”
“That does not make me a surveyor.”
“No.” Charlotte separated another lock of Grace's hair. “It does make your concern less entirely about maps.”
Grace turned her head. “Is it about love?”
“Hold still,” Charlotte said.
“Everyone keeps saying that to me.”
Caroline closed the compass. “It is about the company losing a useful man.”
Charlotte nodded.
Caroline waited. “You do not believe me.”
“I did not say that.”
“Your face did.”
Charlotte smiled. “Eleanor says the same thing about Lydia.”
“I am not Lydia.”
“No. Lydia would have asked Thomas whether he planned to leave.”
Caroline wrapped the compass in blue wool. “Lydia has no restraint.”
From the other side of the wagon, Lydia said, “Thank you.”
Caroline lay down and pulled the blanket to her chin.
Across the camp, Thomas's fire burned beside his bedroll. He sat with the folded letter in his hand.
Caroline turned her back to it.
The compass rested beneath her pillow, its needle pointing north whether she wished to know the direction or not.